Oh Deer, How Should I Handle This? Seasonal Priors for Selective Wildlife Annotation and Classification
Fine-grained wildlife classification in aerial imagery is limited not only by model performance, but also by unreliable labels: animals occupy few pixels, key visual cues vary seasonally, and modality-specific evidence can be ambiguous. We study adult-male identification in red deer ($\textit{Cervus elaphus}$), where the antler cycle defines predictable windows of reliable evidence for both annotation and prediction. Using 7,295 RGB-only, thermal-only, and matched RGB+thermal crop sets from low-altitude UAV surveys, labeled by three annotators, we show that seasonal structure links (I) annotation quality, (II) downstream classification, and (III) selective prediction. Matched RGB+thermal ...
| Authors | Hugo Markoff, Christoph Praschl, Anton Hjalte Jørgensen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 3 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 August 2026 |
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